


Driver of My Soul

by sans_carte



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Monica Rambeau Has Two Moms, One Shot, Post-Movie, harold...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 10:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18206990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sans_carte/pseuds/sans_carte
Summary: Carol comes back.  She’d told Monica she wouldn’t be gone long, after all.  But she can't exactly remember what she's been missing.Written very hastily after seeing Captain Marvel, because you can't convince me Carol and Maria weren't (basically) married; forgive any errors in continuity or spelling.





	Driver of My Soul

Carol comes back.  She’d told Monica she wouldn’t be gone long, after all.  And after she’s settled Talos and his band of Skrulls on the planet they’ve found, far from the reach of the Kree, he pretty much kicks her ass back to Earth anyway.

“I can get the next group of Skrulls, bring them here,” she insists.

“You can’t, not yet.  They’ve gone to ground.  I know where some groups are, but they won’t just trust you if you show up with your lightshow and your Kree uniform.  Even if it is a different color now.”

“I want to _do_ something.”  She’s pacing across the purple soil of this new planet.  It’s a gorgeous home, really--two moons in the turquoise sky, rolling hills--but she’s too antsy to really appreciate it right now.  “I have so much to make up for, all these planets the Kree have taken over--”

“Carol.  Go home.”

She pauses in her pacing, stares at Talos.  He’s sitting on an amethyst boulder, watching her calmly.

“Go back to Earth.  It’ll take a while for me to reach out, get in touch with some of the other groups of survivors.  Then I’ll contact you and you can help move them.” He shakes one of the Skrulls’ glowing communicators at her.  “You’ll just be a long-distance call away.”

She looks down at her skin, glowing very faintly with her amped-up mood.  “I could go to Hala. Work on taking down the Supreme Intelligence, undoing all the lies.”

“Sure, you could do that, and the Kree would immediately retaliate on any planets with suspected Skrull populations.” Talos stands up--wincing a little, his shoulder is still healing--and comes over to her.  Looks into her eyes, the way he had back in Louisiana when he was trying to convince her that his people weren’t the threat. “You’ll take them down, in time. But right now, you get to take a break. Go home to your family.”

She inhales, slowly.  Knows he doesn’t mean the yelling father she barely remembers, the brother who told her to slow down.

“Trust me,” Talos adds, “you don’t want to miss any more time with them than you have to.”

There’s pain in his voice.  Carol looks away. “There’s so much I don’t remember.  I feel like there’s more, like I’m still missing whole pieces of me…” The words knot themselves in her throat.

“So go find them,” he tells her.

***

She comes back.  She isn’t sure how long it’s been on Earth, exactly, and when she crash-lands in a bayou--still getting the hang of her powers--it’s just as muggy and hot as it was the last time she was in Louisiana, the cicadas screaming just as loud in the cypress trees.

Cicada.  She remembers the word, now--not a word she ever knew on Hala.  She remembers how little Monica had been both fascinated and grossed out to find their ghostly shells clinging to the trunks of trees after they molted, when they came and visited with Maria’s folks on leave from the Pegasus base. As Carol flies back over firm land and to the road leading to Maria’s house, getting these shards of memory back feels like a triumph.

She walks into the open-air workshop, which is rumbling with the sound of a plane engine.  A jumpsuited figure, tall and strong as ever, sits inside the plane’s cockpit, studying the controls and listening intently to the engine.

“Hey, you take walk-ins?”

Maria looks up, through the windshield, her big brown eyes wide with surprise.  The sight makes Carol grin, and simultaneously something _aches_ behind her ribs.

The engine noise cuts out as Maria fumbles at the dashboard and spills out of the plane.  “You’re back,” she says, and then she’s striding forward and wrapping her arms around Carol’s shoulders.

 _Go home_ , Talos had said.  Carol squeezes her eyes shut, hugs Maria back, smells the sweat and the faint traces of hair products and engine oil.   _This_ feels like home.

Eventually Maria pulls back to look at her.  “Everything okay?” she asks. “We being invaded by aliens again?”

Carol smiles, shakes her head.  “Everything’s fine. No alien invaders this time.  Talos and his family are good, I got them settled on a safe planet.”

“C’mon, I’ll get you some sweet tea and you can tell me all about it.”  Maria reaches out like she’s going to grab Carol’s hand, but then stops short.  Puts her hand in her pocket instead.

Carol follows her towards the house.  “Where’s Monica?”

“At school.  It’s a Tuesday.”

“Oh.  Um, how long was I…?”

Maria glances sidelong at her.  “Five years.”

“What?!” Carol stops short, heart clenching.  She didn’t mean to be away that long, the time dilation must’ve--

Maria’s grinning at her.  “I’m just messin’ with you.  It’s been four months, it’s September.”

“You asshole!” Carol elbows her friend, hears her laugh, and it feels both familiar and strange at once, being this particular kind of happy.

***

Monica is predictably elated when she comes home from the bus stop to find her Auntie Carol sitting on the porch with her mom.  Dives right into a hug, and Carol notices the girl’s head is almost an inch higher against her than last time. She talks basically the whole way through dinner, telling Carol about everything that’s happened in the last four months, until her mom threatens to eat all of the untouched food on her plate.  While wolfing it down, Monica demands updates from Carol on Talos and his wife and kid.

Carol obliges, of course.  She can’t say no to Lieutenant Trouble, after all.

After dinner, Monica clears the table and Carol takes up position at the sink, insisting on doing the dishes.  Maria leans against the wall of the kitchen watching them, and eventually asks a question, slow like she isn’t really looking forward to the answer.

“How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know.  For a while.” Carol sees a faint softening of Maria's shoulders, as if in relief.  “I have a communicator, Talos is gonna let me know when he needs me to move the next group of Skrull refugees.”

“Well, we’re gonna have to go to the grocery store soon, then.  You eat a lot, Captain Lite-brite,” Maria teases. “Even more than Monica with her growth spurts.”

“Hey, photon blasts require a lot of energy,” Carol jokes back, holding up her dish-soapy hands and making them glow a little, while Monica giggles.  Maria smiles, and it’s like she’s got her own glow, shining from her cheeks.

For no reason, it makes Carol look down at the dishes and clear her throat.  “So, you heard anything from Fury?”

***

That night Maria can’t sleep.  Stays awake listening to the crickets and frogs take over after the cicadas’ song dies down, to the faint hum of the fan in Monica’s bedroom.  Finally she gives up and goes downstairs, still in her PJs and hair wrap, thinking about some chamomile tea...or screw it, maybe some whiskey. It’s been a day.

But Carol is awake instead of on the spare bed she’d made up.  She’s sitting at the kitchen table and staring at photos scattered across it.  Monica had insisted on breaking out some photos from her birthday party in June and from the Rambeaus’ Fourth of July family cookout over in Lafayette, before Maria had eventually sent her to bed.

Maria leans one hip against the table, next to Carol.  “Couldn’t sleep either?”

Carol shakes her head, unruly blonde locks slipping forward.  “Don’t seem to need as much of it, now.”

But she’s frowning at one of the photos, and Maria can’t help but ask what she always used to, times Carol got like this.  Brooding and dark instead of her usual impish grin or determined glare or bright curiosity. She’s a little more closed off, now--whatever those Kree did, they made her learn to keep the expression off her face a little better.

“Where’s your head at?”

Carol’s eyes flicker up to her.  “I remember you saying that. Us walking across the tarmac together,” she says.  She picks up a photo--the one of her and a younger Monica at Halloween, both grinning at the camera, at Maria--and holds it delicately at the edges.  “But there’s so much I feel like I’m missing.”

Suddenly she drops the photo.  It’s just in time, because her hands are blazing, curled into fists.  “They took so much from me. My memories, my life--”

Maria reaches down, runs a hand over Carol’s shoulder to where it meets her neck.  The muscles there are tense as they’d ever been whenever Carol got stressed in flight school, or that one time her mother had sent her a letter that Carol wouldn’t let her read.  The blonde woman leans unconsciously into the touch, as her fists slowly extinguish themselves and uncurl.

“Maybe you’ll get more of it back, with time,” Maria offers, swallowing hard.  “You never know.”

“Yeah, maybe.”  Carol doesn’t sound convinced.

Maria stands up.  “C’mon, I wanna show you something.”

She grabs a flashlight from the drawer in the kitchen, stops near the back door to pull on some old sneakers.  Carol follows her lead and sticks her feet in a pair of too-big work boots, and then joins her outside.

The house might be small, but there’s enough land and room for multiple sheds and the workshop--something Maria had looked for when she came back here, after the crash six years ago.  After the Pegasus project had been unceremoniously scrapped and her superiors had heavily hinted that an honorable discharge would be the best course for her. And in one of the sheds, once she’s removed the padlock and found the switch for the hanging shop lights, she had kept one final reminder of her lost friend.

She pulls off the cover, thick with dust, and watches Carol’s face.

It’s blank, at first--then a hint of an expression, the twinge of excitement Carol used to get at Pancho’s poker night when she had a good hand.  She was crap at poker, back then.

“My Mustang.  You kept it.”

Maria smiles.  “Couldn’t bear to get rid of it.  Thought I might fix it up for when Monica’s old enough to drive.”

“You’d let her drive this beauty?” Carol steps forward, runs a reverent hand over the hood.  And Maria remembers those strong, capable hands from before they had light in them…

She clears her throat.  “Well, only after she proves she’s ready for it.”  She pops the driver’s side door open, tilts her head.  “Get in.”

Carol does so, while she goes around and gets in the passenger’s seat herself.  The doors thunk shut, and Maria watches her friend settle into the leather seat, rest her palms on the steering wheel.

And then she watches as Carol _remembers_.

***

It’s the smell of the leather seats, maybe, strong in the enclosed space.  Or it’s the feel of the steering wheel under her hands. Carol isn’t sure, exactly.  But it’s like walking into Pancho’s and getting all those flashes of memory--she suddenly pictures flying down a dusty road in this car, grinning and intent on beating Maria.  She remembers sitting in these seats sharing fries from the drive-through with a pregnant Maria, who insisted that she should get the larger share because “I’m eating for two and a half, dammit, I swear this kid’s gonna be a giant the way she’s growing…”

She remembers kissing someone in the backseat, sweaty and desperate, pressing into firm muscle and soft curves--

Her hand reaches up of its own accord, pulls down the sun visor.  There’s a metal clip holding one more photo, kept safe here and away from any prying eyes.  She tugs it loose and looks at it in the dim light spilling through the windshield from overhead.

She has one arm around Maria’s shoulders, both of them in coveralls, and she’s kissing Maria’s smooth brown cheek, her eyes closed and nose pressed close to skin.  Maria’s smiling as she takes the picture, and it’s such a gentle, loving smile that the ache returns behind Carol’s sternum.

(She used to feel that ache sometimes, when she--when _Vers_ woke alone in her quarters on Hala.  It was almost as bad as the dreams.)

She turns to find Maria watching her, eyes wide and careful again.  The same way she’d looked the night they first kissed, tipsy in the bathroom of an off-base bar: hopeful, excited, but wary of the repercussions.

Carol does what she had done back then, partly to reassure Maria and partly because she _wanted_ : leans forward and kisses her friend.

Maria kisses her back, soft at first like she can’t believe it but then hungry, six years of ache behind it, and now it comes back in a rush.  Echoes of other kisses. Frenzied makeouts before returning to base, rare mornings of toe-curling sex when Monica was still sleeping.

...No, not just her friend, her co-pilot, but her partner.  Her _wife_ , even though they couldn’t call each other that outside their bedroom, even though they never had rings or a certificate.

“You remember,” Maria gasps against her lips.  “I was so scared you wouldn’t…”

Carol leans up and kisses her forehead, the tip of her nose, the side of her slender neck.  “I remember now,” she breathes. “God, how could I forget this.”

Maria chuckles, loud and warm in the enclosed space.  “Sweet talker.”

“Only for you, baby.”  Carol intertwines their fingers as she leans in again.  “Only ever for you.”

**Author's Note:**

> ...comments and kudos welcome. Also credit to soul queen Irma Thomas for the title, from "Ruler of my Heart".


End file.
